Andrew Pring looks at the drive to improve quality

Quality is the new watch-word for the trade today.

Quality in everything you do as a licensee, be it quality of drink and food offer, quality of interior décor, or quality of staff.

It's a tough call to get quality right across all you do when there are so many pressures on your business. But the spur is that when you get them all right, you also get quality of profits.

More than anything, it's the smoking ban that's forced everyone to look really hard at what they're doing and see how the quality of the pub experience can be improved.

Over the past decade or so, we've all talked, sometimes a bit blithely, about how pubs must up their game if they're to survive and thrive in the new leisure economy. But with all the turmoil and disruption brought on by constantly-changing ownerships, focus has been lacking.

Now, though, with 1 July just around the corner, it's crunch time. And frankly, we're not all in the place we should be. Too many pubs still haven't come to terms with what they need to be doing to wow their customers. Too many still don't get the basics right. And even the most lauded pubs don't always get it consistently right either, so it's clearly not just a question of money. The right attitude towards your customers - being prepared to put them first - is crucial. And not everyone gets it.

Soon, they'll have to. New customers flocking to pubs with no smoke inside - and there will be many of them - will not return if the quality is poor. And that will be a massive, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity lost.

The drive to quality is something the Morning Advertiser supports, week in and week out, with examples of best business practice. And last week we launched a new monthly section, Quality Tracker, which we hope will help inspire all licensees to up their game by comparing themselves with other licensees and bench-marking themselves against the standards everyone should be operating by.

Quality Tracker is based on the findings of mystery shoppers, who report on individual pubs they've visited back to a top market-research company called ESA, which also does something similar called the Grocer 33 for our sister title The Grocer.

Morning Advertiser believes there's no more important issue facing the trade than the need to raise standards in pubs. It's a massive challenge. But we're here to help you every step of the way.